How do I go about optimizing a codebase?

Question

Say I wanted to improve the performance of a large codebase such as a compiler, runtime, web server, etc.How do you do this? I guess you can profile it but there&rsquo;s so much information that the profiler gives and I usually don&rsquo;t know where to look. How do you know where to look? Are there any books, blogposts that are good to start learning how to do this?

aeolianmad · Accepted Answer

What type of code base is it? Perhaps we can offer recommeded profiling tools for a particular stack. What are you looking to optimize and how did you identify it? Was it perceptual or something you measured?